Priscilla
Page 21
A phrase can be a clap of thunder. Brazen lies? The truth about her life? War record in Occupied France? In a minor but vital way I was suddenly now part of this story, the reason why Gillian was motivated to fill notebook after notebook with explicit memories of my aunt.
In 1992, Gillian Sutro had been struggling with a memoir. It was her second attempt. She had abandoned an earlier memoir, about her marriage to John Sutro, in favour of an account of her upbringing in France during the 1920s and 1930s. Graham Greene, who lived nearby in Antibes, had encouraged her: ‘Your life as a girl in pre-war Paris was most unusual. You would be a goose not to make use of it.’
But once again Gillian had become stuck. She groused to Harold Acton: ‘Through following GG’s advice and enlarging my canvas, it has meant a great deal more work.’ Then one November morning, on her terrace in Monte Carlo where she had moved from London in 1974, she read my interview with Janina David, about growing up in the Warsaw Ghetto – and everything that Gillian had stifled for half a century poured out.
In that interview, I had written: My aunt, captured in France by the Germans, spent time in two concentration camps. She was tortured and unable to bear children.
Priscilla had been dead for ten years. All their lives they had been the best of friends, with not the slightest dent apparent in their relationship. But this mention of what our family believed had happened to Priscilla in the war was the back-breaking straw. It galvanised Gillian to recalibrate her past history with Priscilla and to put the record straight – ‘mettre les pendules à l’heure’ was her phrase. And in the act of correcting the pendulum she found herself once more pushed back down the years to their Paris childhood: the cafés and cinemas they frequented, the botched abortion, the lavish wedding to the Vicomte at which Gillian had acted as ‘witness’, the Hungarian lover they may or may not have shared, up to the moment when German tanks rolled into France, and Gillian fled to England on the last train from Gare Saint-Lazare, distraught at having to leave Priscilla behind.
But Gillian’s recollections of Priscilla in pre-war Paris were the least of it. Her project assumed an urgency which the sifting of fifty-year-old memories did nothing to lessen. ‘I was determined to find out more.’
Small details, Gillian believed, can destroy relationships quicker than big knocks. Her husband’s brother Edward Sutro had left his wife because of the way she slurped her soup. The two lines that I had written about my aunt became the spark to ignite a pyre that Gillian had unconsciously been assembling under her childhood friend since the moment in 1944 when Priscilla walked through her front door in London. Now, ten years after Priscilla’s death, Gillian made a retrospective decision: Priscilla, apart from lying about the concentration camp, had not told the truth in other areas and had betrayed Gillian by going to bed with Vertès. What consumed Gillian, and stirred her to confront the suspicions and misgivings that she had suppressed, were Priscilla’s activities during the Occupation.
‘The Occupation period has always been my obsession,’ Gillian wrote in her apartment in Monaco, where she lived alone with her dog. ‘Morbid I agree, but riveting in its horror and humiliation. The way it brought out the best and worst in people. The struggle for survival. How would I have coped with being clamped in a prison camp in Besançon where the Brits were herded by the Germans (this happened to my most intimate girlfriend)?’ The question had preoccupied Gillian since her husband’s death in 1985 and it dominated her life after she read my article. ‘I have done a great deal of research in those years. Priscilla was far from helpful. She did not wish to talk about the Occupation, later pretended to have forgotten. With persistence I managed to drag some facts from her.’ These, coupled with facts provided by Zoë Temblaire, ‘who lived through the Occupation and saw a great deal of Priscilla, plus a book on the Occupation giving certain names, helped me to find out what Priscilla did not want me to know.’
The implication took a moment to absorb. All the time I was pestering my family about Priscilla, Gillian had been approaching other witnesses, telephoning Zoë in Paris, sending questionnaires to Harold Acton in Florence, her sister Jacqueline in Lieurey – asking the same things.
‘Where did she live when she left Besançon?’
‘Did she ever see Robert after Besançon?’
‘“Otto” was a code name. How did she meet him?’
‘What was his profession supposed to be?’
And Gillian, apparently, had discovered the answers. ‘I think her experiences are worth recounting,’ she wrote.
Listed in a small red Century notebook entitled ‘PRIS’ were intimate details of my aunt’s life and loves, beginning with Robert Donat (‘who met her at a party we gave’). Each lover was supplied with his surname, plus everything that Gillian could recall Priscilla having said about him. The Scarlet Pimpernel was Daniel Vernier, a married and well-connected industrialist who, after visiting Priscilla in Besançon, supplied her with identity papers. Emile was the figure at the wheel of the Delahaye, Emile Cornet, a Belgian black-marketeer and Bugatti racing driver who won the Belgian Grand Prix and finished his career as the press secretary of Princess Grace of Monaco. Pierre was Pierre Duboyon, Vernier’s brother-in-law, who owned a textile factory in Annemasse fabricating nylon stockings. Gillian had even discovered the identity of the mysterious Otto. ‘Over him Pris was clam-like. Nevertheless, bit by bit, I found out certain facts.’
Gillian’s change of mind about her best friend was painful. Priscilla had put everyone on the spot and forced those who had known her to reappraise not only their image of Priscilla, but their view of themselves.
For three months, I read and transcribed Gillian’s notebooks. Again and again, I had the freakish impression of being taken by the wrist and led down, through a procession of unlocking doors, into the cellars beneath one of the most fascinating and yet, in spite of all the literature on it, incompletely explored moments of the twentieth century – a period over which France continues to draw firm bolts: ‘Four years to strike from our history,’ is how the French still refer to it. Because what Gillian had written down was the other half of the key.
20.
PARIS: FEBRUARY 1941
André Gide wrote in his diary near the start of the war: ‘What is the best thing the rat can do when caught in a trap? Eat the bacon.’
Robert was not at their apartment in Rue Nollet, which had a musty smell after remaining unheated all winter. Priscilla did not tell her husband that she was free for another day or two. Instead, she started an affair with Daniel.
‘When I came out I was hungry for pleasure and I started to enjoy myself, or so I thought.’ From her fictional memoir it is clear that they first made love in Daniel’s apartment in 12 Rue Beaujon where he had begged her to spend the night on the eve of her arrest. Daniel helped Priscilla off with her coat and took her in his arms. He loved her, he could not bear to see her so thin, so unhappy. ‘He must have been very sure of me,’ she thought, watching him pour her a strong martini. But she accepted the cocktail.
They did not say much at dinner, just sat and looked at each other and held hands, and his face was not unattractive after all. When it became time to leave, she put on her coat. Daniel watched her, frightened of making a false move. ‘Please, stay longer.’ With a smile formed by three months of internment, she remained standing. Taking advantage of the silence, he removed her coat.
Priscilla had not been touched by a man since her honeymoon. The last time that she had made love was four years before, with the father of her aborted child. In the draft of Priscilla’s speech for her 1963 AA meeting, she left a telling note that reveals the turmoil she was in: ‘Age 25, couldn’t remember a thing about night with Daniel – which should have been a warning.’ The effect of his lovemaking, combined with his lethal martini, not to ignore Priscilla’s weakened and emotional state, was to make her black out.
She had been expelled from Besançon into a France – a Europe – where an exhilarated German
y looked triumphant. The crime novelist Georges Simenon wrote to his mother in March 1941: ‘I hope the English will not hold out much longer.’ Simenon – a friend of Gillian, Vertès and Kessel (who had commissioned his first Inspector Maigret story) – was in the majority. By early summer, Greece, Yugoslavia and Libya were in Axis hands; Crete would follow soon; and in June, in the largest military operation in history, German troops advanced into Russia. A huge ‘V’ hung on the Eiffel Tower and a banner proclaimed ‘Deutschland Siegt An Allen Fronten’ – Germany victorious on all fronts. In London, two parachute mines killed thirty-four people in the Café de Paris, touted as the safest restaurant in town; 33,118 civilians had died in raids by the end of March. Between March and May, 412 Allied ships were sunk in the Battle of the Atlantic. The pro-German broadcaster Jacques Doriot assured listeners on Radio Paris: ‘England is defeated, her fleet is at the bottom of the sea.’ In the running tide, where to turn?
In the spring of 1941, to resurface as an Englishwoman in a Paris full of Germans was not easy. Priscilla’s first days were particularly traumatic. The omnipotent slam of a car door, a footstep on the stairs, a key turning in a lock, and she was ready to leap to the door. If she went to a restaurant, it unnerved her to see so many people. It was hard to eat. She felt tired, her vitality gone. It had stayed behind in Besançon, rising with the bugle at seven and lying down at six.
If anything, Caserne Vauban had fostered Priscilla’s natural passivity. Released, she behaved in the same way as her fellow internee Rita Harding, who, repatriated to London, lived with her aunt. ‘If my aunt said, “What would you like to do – go on Epsom Downs or to the cinema?” I’d look at her blankly and say, “I don’t know.” At Besançon, we didn’t make a decision about anything.’
When Priscilla had put down her suitcase on returning to her apartment, bedbugs streamed out of it. Occupied France was Besançon mapped large. If she ventured into Rue Nollet, she noticed that her lassitude was something that she shared with other Parisians. It was impossible to know what anyone was thinking.
After Jacqueline Grant was released in July she went to stay in a convent in Neuilly, where Priscilla visited her. They had trouble recognising one another. Jacqueline was ‘thin as a nail’. Plus, she had agoraphobia. ‘I was frightened of walking down a street by myself. If I had someone to talk to, I was reasonably all right.’ Indoors, she and Priscilla could talk. But when Jacqueline left the convent with Priscilla to visit wounded English POWs at the Hôpital Communal, she was assailed by a terrible feeling which stayed with her for years afterwards. ‘I wanted to hug the walls.’
On top of everything, Priscilla remained an enemy alien, reminded of it at every turn. She itemised her restrictions at that inaugural AA meeting: ‘I was allowed to return to Paris and live with my husband on condition that I signed at the nearest police station every day.’ This was at 16 Place Charles Fillion, a ten-minute walk from her apartment. ‘I couldn’t move out of Paris. I was not allowed to have a wireless or telephone. I was not allowed to ride in a car or on a bicycle – only communal transport, and I had to be in just before dark.’ In addition, she had ‘no right to exercise a profession which involves walking’ although she was allowed to ride a horse.
The Germans enforced most of these rules. Yvette Goodden was barely a month back in Paris when one morning at 5 a.m. the Gestapo knocked on her door to check that she did not have a wireless or telephone and also that she had her young son Michael with her – the reason for Goodden having been freed. Every morning she repeated to her son, ‘Allons, viens, on va signer,’ and they walked to the police station. If she wanted to go away for the weekend, the policeman, whom Michael knew as ‘Monsieur Signer’, allowed her to sign in large letters across two days. Out of doors, mother and son talked in French. Goodden said: ‘I stopped speaking English with Michael in the street so as not to draw attention.’
Not to speak English was one of the deprivations that caused Priscilla most grief. That and her childlessness, her false position reinforced by the priority ration cards to which, as an expectant mother, she was entitled. She did risk riding a bicycle, though.
On Saturday, Robert arrived from Boisgrimot. ‘He could still muster no enthusiasm.’ They did not say much; Priscilla did not like to ask him or even to ask herself his thoughts. Every subject was a bed of nettles; they skirted, spoke of nothing, except on the subject of his farming produce – how most of it went to feed the occupying forces, with the rest flowing out to Germany at rock-bottom prices. They lay with their arms around each other for warmth. She was supposed to be pregnant, but she felt like one of the prams in the exodus which had not contained any baby. His impotence was France’s. ‘He soon went back to Normandy and to his gloom.’ She was almost relieved that the conditions of her release prevented her from following.
‘I love you,’ Robert wrote, in letters adjuring her to be happy.
‘I love you,’ she wrote back. But they were saying ‘I love you’ to plug the gaps, forestall discussion, and signal, against all evidence to the contrary, that everything was going to be fine.
It was not. ‘His letters became more and more neurotic and depressed.’ Boisgrimot had suffered a plague of rats. Then an infestation of beetles. The pupils had been taken out of school for three days to help hunt down the beetles and destroy them.
Now when they were together, hardly a day passed in which Priscilla was not exasperated by Robert’s morose inertia. It was not simply that she blamed him for Besançon and for not giving her children. He had no flavour for her. And after so long a drought, she wanted flavour. As Priscilla wrote of her alter ego, Crystal de Brie, in the novel that I found in her stepdaughter’s box: ‘Most of her friends were having affairs and how could anyone be expected to live in chastity for years on end?’
Priscilla’s most revealing portrait of herself at this time is contained not in her novel, but in a story that she wrote from the perspective of an Austrian-Jewish writer, Hans, who bumped into her and Robert after she was freed from Besançon.
Hans was lunching in his usual cheap restaurant – ‘when in walked a couple who caught my eye at once. The man must have been about five years younger than me, which made him 40 or thereabouts. He was tall and distinguished-looking. His wife was my idea of perfection. She was much younger than her husband – not more than 23 or 4. Tall, blonde and Aryan. I judged them to be married because the man read his paper throughout the meal and the girl was obviously deep in her own thoughts – they hardly exchanged a word. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.’
Priscilla wrote elsewhere of meeting a Hans Mayer during the Occupation, but gave no details. It is tempting to assume that this was the Viennese-Jewish writer Hans Mayer, who may have been in Paris in August 1941, and was later transported to Auschwitz – the fate of the Austrian-Jewish writer in Priscilla’s story.
Mid-forties, ungainly, with no money ‘and nothing much to offer’, Priscilla’s Hans is a poor kinsman of the Lieutenant from Caen. One glimpse and he is bewitched.
‘When they paid their bill and left the restaurant I got up to go too and I was in time to see the girl get on her bicycle and ride away leaving her husband to go wherever he was going on foot. I watched her until she was out of sight and thought that I had never seen anyone so graceful with her long legs pedalling and her fair hair streaming behind her.
‘After that day, she was never out of my thoughts. I was obsessed by her. I saw her several times more in the same restaurant and my method of staring at her seemed to amuse her. She mentioned it to her husband one day. He gave me a cursory glance and went back to his newspaper.’
Hans came to recognise which café Priscilla was in by her bicycle parked outside. He judged her to be American or English, as she always carried an English book under her arm.
‘I tried to think of a way to get to know her and one day I bought a bouquet of red roses and put them on her bicycle with a card saying how beautiful she was and how much I admired her.
‘“Thank you for the flowers,” she said in English.’
Hans invited her for a drink at a nearby café.
‘She told me about her life before the war in England and then I made her talk of her marriage – she wanted children badly but her husband was impotent. “He was so kind to me. He replaced the father that I never had. If we had had children my happiness would have been complete.”’ But now, though she was very fond of him, he irritated her more and more. He lacked any sense of humour or gaiety, she told Hans.
‘Why did you marry him?’
‘Oh, he was different before the war – we used to have fun – but he has gone to pieces. He is so old for his age and nothing amuses him any more. He is crushed.’
Hans decided to write a book about her; in return he would teach her German. ‘I lived for the short time that she spared me every day.’ But his book soon ran into difficulty. ‘I tried to understand her, but the more I tried the less I understood. She was desperately homesick and I think that was one of the reasons she liked me. There were few people she could talk English to. Her husband had no knowledge of her language. They led a strange life those two. He treated her like a child. They never had any meals at home because he didn’t want her to be bothered with housekeeping. As a result she was bored. She had nothing to do except to get into mischief. He was often away and when he was in Paris he spent most of the time at the Bourse. She was plagued by in-laws as he was the youngest of a large family and they all seemed to be very Germanophile.’ She was heartily sick of the lot of them. ‘I owe my months of concentration camp to them.’